survive
by spheeris1
Summary: AU :: Spencer & Ashley POV :: Bull-sh*t one-shot :: Angst lil' jewel :: Girls who cannot break free. :: Probably will not keep this one up long...


**Hey there Flannel Club, turn your PM back on and I shall give you angst. And, yes, I just wrote this to pass along a message. **

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When did pain start to feel so damn good?

/

Ashley's head hurts and she pushes her fingertips against the scalp, past strands of dirty hair. She could sleep for a while longer but voices are drifting in and out of her living room.  
>It's just another party, going from night to day, it's just another quick sniff and she'll be okay again, going from lines to liquid.<p>

There is a guy in her bed.  
>And he looks like a pop idol - slick and more make-up than she'd even wear and tan skin that only machines can create. There's a good chance they didn't sleep together. Still, there's a good chance that they did.<p>

All of Ashley's chances are bad, though.

All of Ashley's chances are slipping away and she'll let them, no questions asked.

\\

Spencer is so much more demanding and her father's eyes just cannot understand the girl anymore, her mother's lips can no longer form the right words.  
>But Spencer likes things this way.<br>The longer she can keep them away, the less she has to say, and the less she has to say, the longer she can pretend that nothing is wrong.

Nothing is ever wrong. The coffee is in the white mug. The toast is golden. The clock chimes at noon. The car is detailed. The papers are stacked nice and neat. The jobs are done. The lights go out. Her head hits the pillow and her eyes close.

She sleeps in the middle.

And, yet, the left side is cold and the right side is desperate.

She'll need someone soon to fill up the spaces, a temporary solace or a fleeting fuck, she'll need someone soon to stay this wandering mind.

Spencer needs someone, though.

Spencer needs someone that she can never have, that she never had at all.

/

When did you start to love those you never should?

\\

Every once in a while, the illusion breaks and there's this bar on 53rd Avenue and it's dark and there is not one face that knows either one of them.

So, they go to that dark and nameless place, in their separate cars and with their individual lives and with all the complicated feelings that no therapist can manage to sort out.

They drink. They don't talk. They kiss and they touch and they say it is nothing special.  
>Because they don't exist, not in this shitty world of mistakes and fumbles and lies and other wounded words. They don't exist at all.<p>

Ashley can taste it, though, along the smooth path of Spencer's spine.

Spencer can hear it, though, a symphony trapped in Ashley's heated moan.

They don't exist, until they see one another, and then that dangerous universe is recreated.

/

How do you fix what was never right?

\\

Ashley thinks it'll all come crashing down one day and they'll find her body on the bed - like Marilyn - and publicists will covered up the powder, hide the pills, and death will be blamed on that prescription pushing doctor.

Her mother in dark sunglasses. Kyla in tears. Aiden still looking like a love-sick child.

And the press. And the fictional friends and agents.

Ashley thinks it would be nice to end it all now. Or, better yet, fake this demise and disappear. Maybe take her vintage tees. Maybe take her guitar.

Maybe take a girl, too.

But that girl will never leave.

And Ashley won't ever fucking go.

/

Spencer slips into her bathtub and sinks beneath the water and counts the seconds before she will have to rise up and take in air.  
>Two. Five. Ten. Twenty.<p>

It is longer each time and easier each time, too. Her lungs expand and then the bones grow tight and wondrous spots of color fill up her vision. And it would be so simple, really it would, to drown.

That's how they would find her, washed up on a ceramic shore, pale and cold and vacant.  
>Her father would mourn forever. Her mother would blame that God she so adores. Siblings would try to figure out the turning point, but they would never get it.<p>

They never did. They never will.

Thirty. Forty-two. Fifty-three. Sixty.

Maybe that girl would show up, too. Maybe that girl would beg for more time or more opportunities or more moments in that dark fucking bar.

Maybe that's the best reason Spencer has for wanting to die.

\\

How are you ever going to live past this night?

/

**-end-**


End file.
